Zelda Fitzgerald: Her Voice in Paradise

by Sally Cline

  They saw the Murphys frequently in Cannes and Zelda’s relationship with them remained steady. But Scott’s deteriorated into a series of rows. This could not have happened at a worse time for the Murphys, who desperately needed support from their friends. Their son Patrick was ill all summer with what would soon be diagnosed as tuberculosis. Scott’s behaviour began to wear down their patience. Zelda recalled: ‘You disgraced yourself at the Barry’s party, on the yacht at Monte Carlo, at the casino with Gerald and Dotty.’47 Scott, constantly tense and irritable, seemed unable to help himself. His anxiety over Zelda’s sexuality made him even more obsessive about ‘fairies’ than he had been previously. In one of his Notes he said ‘Fairies’ represented ‘Nature’s attempt to get rid of soft boys by sterilizing them’.48 This paranoid preoccupation with homosexuals daily infiltrated his writing and increased his anger towards Zelda. The strength of his obsession can be seen in several cancelled scenes from the early versions of Tender Is The Night.

  The scene is Paris at night, a sleazy ‘last call place in Montmartre’, alive with hot American jazz: ‘suddenly we were in a world of fairies – I never saw so many or such a variety together. There were tall gangling ones and little pert ones with round thin shoulders, and great broad ones with the faces of Nero and Oscar Wilde, and fat ones with sly smiles that twisted into horrible leers, and nervous ones who hitched and jerked … self-conscious ones who looked with eager politeness … satyrs whose lips curled horribly.’49

  Sara Murphy felt Scott should forget fairies and concentrate on his wife and child. ‘You don’t even know what Zelda or Scottie are like –’ she wrote ‘– in spite of your love for them. It seemed to us the other night (Gerald too) that all you thought and felt about them was in terms of yourself … I feel obliged in honesty of a friend to write you that the ability to know what another person feels in a given situation will make – or ruin lives.’50

  Though Scott admitted that by now he was indifferent to Zelda,51 he taxed her with precisely his own emotions. ‘You were simply one of all the people who disliked me or were indifferent to me. I didn’t like to think of you.’52 He was probably correct. Their estrangement and hostility heightened. Zelda’s health had become hazardous. She was creative in terrifying bursts of energy, followed instantly by bouts of reclusive fatigue, throughout the summer stay on the Riviera.

  On 27 September 1929 Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms was published, which did not improve their tempers. Scott predicted it would sell about 50,000 copies but it did considerably better. The first printing of 30,000 sold out; two more printings of 10,000 each were run in October. Reviews were excellent. The book topped the bestseller lists. Then the stockmarket crashed, affecting all retail business including books. But Hemingway had become a highly desirable commodity. The fires of literary rivalry between Scott and Ernest were set to blaze.

  When Zelda and Scott returned to 10 rue Pergolèse in Paris in October, Gertrude Stein stoked the coals with some maliciousness. In November53 she asked Hemingway, then her particular protégé, to bring Scott and the Southern poet Allen Tate to one of her Wednesday literary evenings. Wives were also invited but would as usual be handed over to Alice B. Toklas to be entertained, whilst the men challenged each other intellectually and Stein adjudicated.

  Zelda had already met Tate and his Southern novelist wife Caroline Gordon at a party given by the Bishops. She felt at home with her fellow Southerner, so despite her by now almost constant state of nerves she consented to go with Scott. Allen Tate found Zelda ‘immensely attractive, with the Southern woman’s gift for conversation that made people feel she must have known them for years’, but found Scott – who at their first meeting asked him if he enjoyed sleeping with his wife – boorish.54

  So on a December evening Zelda found herself sitting with Caroline Gordon, Pauline Hemingway and Margaret Bishop at Alice’s tea table, whilst in a far corner of Stein’s salon Scott, Ernest, Allen Tate, John Bishop and Ford Madox Ford listened to Stein lecture on American literature. Zelda found nothing worth concentrating on and sat, withdrawn and silent, for several hours while Gertrude traced the path of genius from Emerson through Henry James to herself. She told Ernest that Farewell was good when he invented but less so when he remembered. Ernest’s literary ‘flame’ and Scott’s ‘flame’, she said, were different. Zelda and Hemingway deduced that currently Stein preferred Fitzgerald’s flame, yet Scott inexplicably converted this praise into a slighting remark, and en route home with Zelda and the Hemingways became aggressive towards Ernest. He behaved so badly that the next day, yet again, he was forced to tender apologies.55

  Zelda’s loneliness and confusion, presumably evident to the other guests at Stein’s gathering, led her into another of her infatuations, this time with the first of two redheaded women she became attracted to.56 Scott and Hemingway were united in their disgust. It seemed that everywhere the two men looked that year they found something from the fairy world to shock them, the most obvious centre being Stein’s own.

  Until now Hemingway had tolerated Gertrude and Alice’s menage, which rather uncomfortably resembled a traditional role-ridden heterosexual marriage, because both he and Scott saw Stein as their mentor. But Stein began to repel Hemingway. First she lectured him: the male homosexual act was ‘ugly and repugnant and afterwards they are disgusted with themselves’. Women lovers however did nothing disgusting or repulsive, ‘and afterwards they are happy and can lead happy lives together’. Hemingway’s education at 27 rue de Fleurus continued. One afternoon he arrived there to be told Miss Stein would be right down. He heard ‘someone’ (he doesn’t name Alice) speaking ‘as I had never heard one person speak to another; never, anywhere, ever’. Then Miss Stein’s voice begged and pleaded: ‘Don’t, pussy. Don’t. Don’t, please don’t. I’ll do anything, pussy, but please don’t do it. Please don’t. Please don’t, pussy.’57 So appalled was Ernest that he decided to end his useful friendship with Stein. Scott, however, decided to act more strategically and maintain his friendship with Stein, despite Zelda’s cold indifference to her.

  In February 1930, resisting severe bronchitis and a high fever for two weeks, Zelda insisted on going to ballet classes. Only when dancing did she feel safe. She plied Madame with green silk for a dress, a bandanna filled with perfumes, and more bouquets: white lilacs, black tulips, carnivorous gladioli which she was also capturing on canvas.58

  Unlike her gestures, there was nothing sentimental about Zelda’s flower paintings. Her Untitled white flowers whose petals are like tentacles,59 and her White Flowers in a Vase60 whose blossoms spring from the vase to snake across the table, have writhing expressionistic forms similar to Van Gogh’s. They appear mystical one moment, threatening the next. Zelda became aware of the parallels between her flowers and Van Gogh’s: ‘Those crawling flowers and venomous vindictive blossoms are the hallucinations of a mad-man – without organization or rhythm but with the power to sting and strangle … I loved them … They reassured me.’61

  Despite exhaustion from illness, painting and dancing, Zelda grew restless. So Scott suggested a trip to North Africa in late February for them to recover. In her article ‘Show Mr and Mrs F. to Number–’ she later wrote: ‘It was a trying winter and to forget bad times we went to Algiers. The Hôtel de l’Oasis was laced together by Moorish grills; and the bar was an outpost of civilization with people accentuating their eccentricities. Beggars in white sheets were propped against the walls, and the dash of colonial uniforms gave the cafés a desperate swashbuckling air.’62

  She took her sketch pad but for once photographs offer greater insights. Study Zelda’s eyes sharply. They seem caught in a remote iced-up expression, as if instead of seeing people she saw through them and trusted nobody.

  In Biskra Scott photographed her on a camel, going up and up to visit the sculptor Clare Sheridan. Zelda is a tiny frail figure. Streets glare in the sun. Arabs sell ‘poisonous pink’ sweetmeats and cakes. There are two matching snapshots: Zelda forlorn i
n a vast empty desert which Scott captioned ‘Lost in the Sahara’, and Scott alone on another stretch of dunes peering into the horizon, labelled ‘Looking for a Mirage’. The sad truth is that both figures look lost and lonely.63 Zelda wrote letters to Madame, heard cries in the night, the bleak hills frightened her. She was desperate to return to dancing.

  ‘Then we went to Africa and when we came back … You did not want me … when I wanted you to come home with me you told me to sleep with the coal man.’64 They did not make love, they did not talk.

  As Zelda recalled:

  Then the world became embryonic in Africa – and there was no need for communication. The Arabs fermenting … the curious quality of their eyes and the smell of ants; a detachment as if I was on the other side of a black gauze – a fearless small feeling, and then the end at Easter.65

  ‘The end’ was her first nervous collapse, which took almost two months to reach breaking point. During those eight weeks after their return to rue Pergolèse in Paris her confidence slipped through her fingers. Her friends noticed. The Murphys arrived to take Zelda to an art exhibition and found Bishop and Scott outside the apartment trying to calm Zelda, who was wildly insisting the two men had been talking about her during a lunch the three had shared. Gerald was shocked. How could they have been discussing her without her knowledge? ‘I mean, she was sitting right there with them!’66 He and Sara, who soon had to return to Switzerland to be with Patrick, left deeply concerned about her.

  On another occasion she threw herself at Egorova’s feet after class. Egorova, disturbed by this display, felt Zelda’s affection was becoming unhealthy.67 Zelda was clear about her feelings. ‘My attitude towards Egorova has always been one of intense love. I wanted to help her in some way because she is a good woman … I wanted to dance well so that she would be proud of me and have another instrument for the symbols of beauty that passed in her head that I understood.’68

  Later, time in asylums and re-educative treatment would insist Zelda’s feelings were evil.

  ‘Perhaps it is depraved,’ she wrote later to Scott. ‘I do not know, but at home there was an incessant babbling … and you either drinking or complaining because you had been. You blamed me when the servants were bad, and expected me to instil into them a proper respect for a man they saw morning after morning asleep in his clothes.’69

  In 1930 Edmund Wilson, now recovered from his nervous breakdown and married to Margaret Canby, asked solicitously after Zelda’s health. By this time at a flower market she had told Scott the flowers were talking to her and she was hearing voices not available to others.

  Scott tried to hold his world together by writing a new series of Post stories set during the First World War, about a Chicago debutante, Josephine Perry, based on Ginevra King. On 5 April 1930 ‘First Blood’, the first of his five tales, was published. The remaining four (‘A Nice Quiet Place’, ‘A Woman with a Past’, ‘A Snobbish Story’ and ‘Emotional Bankruptcy’) followed.70 The concept of emotional bankruptcy, a financial metaphor close to Scott’s heart and pocket, became a key notion.

  During 1930 Scott wrote eight stories altogether which secured him $32,000, but yet again he had to borrow $3,700 from Scribner’s against his by now mythical novel. He blamed Zelda for ruining one of his stories because she wanted them to take Madame out to dine. He felt the apartment was foul, the maid stank and Zelda was ‘going crazy and calling it genius – I was going to ruin and calling it anything that came to hand’.71

  When the Kalmans lunched at their apartment in March Zelda, terrified she would miss her dance class, leapt from the table and rushed out, followed by Oscar who took her in a cab. Increasingly distressed, she changed into dancing clothes in the taxi, then when stuck in traffic opened the door, hurled herself out and ran to the studio. Oscar told Scott he thought Zelda was on the verge of a breakdown.

  In April Zelda, in great distress, burst into the flat where Scott was drinking with Michael Arlen. She needed Scott but felt he preferred drinking with the playwright. So distraught was she that Arlen suggested she should try a clinic. She was in no state to resist. Nor could Scott resist the parallels between the narrative of his wife’s life and that of her era. As Zelda succumbed to her first crack-up, Scott, noting the Wall Street crash, assiduously observed in his Ledger: ‘The Crash! Zelda and America’.72

  On 23 April 1930, Zelda entered the ominously named Malmaison Clinic near Paris. Predictably her first agitated words were about work: ‘It’s appalling, it’s horrific, what’s going to become of me, I have to work and I can’t any more. I have to die, and yet I must work. I shall never be cured, let me go, I must go and see “Madame” … she gave me the greatest joy there can be, it is comparable to sunlight falling on a piece of crystal, to a symphony of scents.’73 Professor Claude, who reported these words, said she was in such a state of anxiety she was unable to keep still.

  On her admission, Zelda, slightly tipsy, told the doctors she found alcohol stimulated her dancing. The doctors saw drink as one cause for her anxiety attacks.74

  Zelda’s later letter to Scott recalled:

  I went to Malmaison. You wouldn’t help me – I don’t blame you by now, but if you had explained I would have understood because all I wanted to do was to go on working. You had other things: drink and tennis, and we did not care about each other. You hated me for asking you not to drink … I still believed in love and I thought suddenly of Scottie and that you supported me.75

  Professor Claude decided ‘it is a matter of an anxious young woman exhausted by her work in the world of professional dancers. Some obsessive ideas, the main one being the fear of becoming homosexual. She believes she is in love with her dance teacher … She believes that in the past she has been in love with another woman.’ The medical report mentioned ‘Violent reactions, several suicide attempts, never carried through to the end …’ and said her periods were regular, her blood pressure low, her pulse faint and she had a moderate appetite.

  On 2 May, after ten days, she left Malmaison against her doctor’s wishes.76

  She returned to ballet, but within a fortnight was hallucinating, seeing horrific phantoms everywhere whether awake or asleep, and in terror tried to kill herself. Scott felt he could not leave her side – a sensible precaution but it increased Zelda’s feelings of imprisonment. After she had collapsed into hospital, Scott’s May 1930 Ledger records: ‘Zelda weak and tired … Emily … Zelda everyday’. In June Mayfield reported that Scott’s ‘anxiety did not prevent him from beauing Emily Vanderbilt around Paris’.77

  Zelda’s friends Sara Mayfield and Sara Haardt in Montgomery had not been told about Zelda’s breakdown. Ironically they were rejoicing that there was a temporary improvement in Sara Haardt’s own health. She arrived in Montgomery to tell her father she was marrying Mencken,78 then excitedly called Sara Mayfield in Tuscaloosa to say her novel The Making of a Lady had been accepted by Doubleday Doran for publication in 1931. By the time that Zelda’s two friends heard about her illness Zelda had already entered Valmont Clinic, Glion, near Montreux, Switzerland, on 22 May 1930.

  The clinic, recommended by friends, specifically handled gastrointestinal ailments, so could do little for Zelda. She told the staff she was not sick, she did not want to be hospitalized, she had been brought there under duress. She also stated that ballet, her compensation for a miserable marriage, was her route to independence. She wrote to Scott later that ‘at Valmont I was in tortue, and my head closed together. You gave me a flower and said it was “plus petite et moins etendue” – We were friends – Then you took it away and I grew sicker.’79

  Scott took the French phrase away too, and re-used it in one of the sanatorium letters from his heroine Nicole in Tender Is The Night. ‘One man was nice … he gave me a flower and said it was “plus petite et moins entendue”. We were friends. Then he took it away. I grew sicker.’80

  Zelda later described her entry to Valmont as ‘practically voluntarily but under enormous pressure … with th
e sole idea of getting back enough strenghth and health to continue my work in America as you had promised me. There, my head began to go wrong and the pristine nurse whom you accused me of attacking played almost constantly on the thing that I had assumed I was there to get over.’81

  The doctors and Scott consistently emphasized that Zelda’s lesbian desires were evil and would not be countenanced. But in Valmont she was unable to stop herself responding to a nurse who flirted with her constantly. In the clinic Dr H. W. Trutmann gave this report on her stay there from 22 May to 4 June:

  At the beginning Mrs Fitzgerald maintained that she had not been ill and that she had been taken forcibly to the nursing home82 … she repeated that she wanted to return to Paris to continue with the ballet work in which … she found her only satisfaction in life. Moreover, the patient described in a quite obscure way the physical sensations that she experienced and that she connected with her homosexuality This represented another reason for returning to Paris. The husband’s visits were often the occasion of violent quarrels provoked mainly by the husband’s attempts to … refute the patient’s insinuations that she suspected her husband of homosexuality. Mrs Fitzgerald would work herself into a very excited state at the thought that on the one hand she was losing precious time and on the other that people were trying to take away from her the things most dear to her: her work as a dancer and her lesbian leanings.

  The doctor’s version of the nurse incident differed from Zelda’s: ‘Some over-affectionate behaviour towards the nurse was repulsed by the latter, who fell into disgrace.’83

  The doctors checked Zelda’s agitation with Garderal every one to two hours. They induced sleep with Medinale and a sleeping drug. Trutmann said that when Zelda was calm she was aware she needed both to take care and be taken care of, but an hour later would insist on returning to Paris. He was clear that ‘organically there was nothing to report, no signs of brain disorder’. But he felt a simple rest cure was insufficient, that she needed psychological treatment in a specialist nursing home.